ЛАБОРАТОРИЯ ПЕРЕГОВОРНЫХ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЙ —
некомерческий проект российских ученых.
некомерческий проект российских ученых.
ETHICAL CHALLENGES IN THE TEACHING OF IMPROVISATION FOR PSYCHOLOGISTS' COMMUNICATION
— Temezhnikova O. B., Bazarov T. Y.
Psychology in Russia: State of the Art Volume 13, Issue 2, 2020.
Фото: Melinda Gimpel / Unsplash
Abstract
Background. In the last few decades, the ethical issues in psychological research have gained considerable attention. In our study we discuss training of psychologists from the ethical point of view.
Objective. 1) To develop communication skills with the help of improvisation with the help of a designed training. 2) To uncover the role of ethical questions about the morality of risk–benefit assessment and justification for the conduct of research, selection of a suitable target population, informed consent, and evaluation of our results.
Design. Psychology students are required to develop communication skills that they will need in their future profession. The participants (70 psychology students) were asked to improvise following the three-stage procedure we designed. We describe all the stages of our training program and how the ethical norms contribute to our work. We discuss the ethical norms and rules in the first and third stages of our training session.
Results. We faced several ethical issues with risk–benefit assessment and justification of the conduct of the research. On the one hand, training causes anxiety, putting participants in uncomfortable situations; on the other, this corresponds precisely to the objectives of our work, posing an ethical dilemma. We looked for ways to create more comfortable conditions without jeopardizing the objectives of our study. We introduced concerns about the interpretation of an improviser's work. The improvisers told stories that did not always correspond to reality, which confused the other participants. Discussing this point from an ethical position led us to a deeper understanding of improvisation and led to certain modification in our design of the training program.
Conclusion. We consider improvisation a creative process which helps one to adapt to new, uncomfortable situations. Here we show that based on ethical standards and rules, we could properly organize our training and comprehensively review the learning and improvisation process.
Background. In the last few decades, the ethical issues in psychological research have gained considerable attention. In our study we discuss training of psychologists from the ethical point of view.
Objective. 1) To develop communication skills with the help of improvisation with the help of a designed training. 2) To uncover the role of ethical questions about the morality of risk–benefit assessment and justification for the conduct of research, selection of a suitable target population, informed consent, and evaluation of our results.
Design. Psychology students are required to develop communication skills that they will need in their future profession. The participants (70 psychology students) were asked to improvise following the three-stage procedure we designed. We describe all the stages of our training program and how the ethical norms contribute to our work. We discuss the ethical norms and rules in the first and third stages of our training session.
Results. We faced several ethical issues with risk–benefit assessment and justification of the conduct of the research. On the one hand, training causes anxiety, putting participants in uncomfortable situations; on the other, this corresponds precisely to the objectives of our work, posing an ethical dilemma. We looked for ways to create more comfortable conditions without jeopardizing the objectives of our study. We introduced concerns about the interpretation of an improviser's work. The improvisers told stories that did not always correspond to reality, which confused the other participants. Discussing this point from an ethical position led us to a deeper understanding of improvisation and led to certain modification in our design of the training program.
Conclusion. We consider improvisation a creative process which helps one to adapt to new, uncomfortable situations. Here we show that based on ethical standards and rules, we could properly organize our training and comprehensively review the learning and improvisation process.
INTRODUCTION
Huge advances in technology, novel challenges, and more and more complicated research have brought ethics to prominence in scientific psychology. Ethics is defined as a moral philosophy or code of morals practiced by a person or group of people (yourdictionary.com). In other words, ethics verbalizes what is considered good or bad, moral or immoral in a society at a given period of time. Although ethics in the narrow sense has been discussed and applied in medicine and biomedical research for centuries, ethics in the general sense and as applied to psychology is a concept of the 20th century (Dilman, 2005; Luegenbiehl & Clancy, 2017; Mason et al., 2019; Spencer-Oatey & Xing, 2019).
Although seemingly clear-cut, it still has certain areas requiring further conceptualization and rigorous research, with a particular focus on applied issues of psychology studies today. The basic principles of research ethics are three: (a) minimizing the risk of harm; (b) obtaining informed consent; and (c) protecting anonymity and confidentiality (Laerd Dissertation, n.d.; Artal and Rubenfeld, 2017; Grech, 2018).
The importance of ethics is supported by numerous articles dealing with medical practice or interaction with special groups of respondents. Thus, articles on cancer patients, newborns, and experimental studies of humans and animals emphasize the necessity to rely on ethical norms and rules, each time checking our actions in terms of the balance between benefits and harm, observing the boundaries of autonomy, and providing the requested information to all the participants in full (Harper et al., 2018; Buzdar and Hoover, 2017; Houdayer et al., 2019). The research tradition both abroad and here in Russia rests on already established milestones in medical studies and biological research.
The legacy World War II, of tremendous shocking with experience triggered broad research on war veterans and other civilians finally leading to understanding of the need for guiding principles for investigating the human (Schuler, 2013). The first document designed to regulate the professional behavior of psychologists was the Code of Ethics of the American Psychological Association, which was adopted in 1953 (American Psychological Association, n.d.).
In Russia, psychological research has long followed the principles formulated by bioethics committees and the common sense intrinsic to the Russian school of psychology. Some issues were already formulated by B.S. Bratus' (1998). However it was not until the 21st century that special attention was paid to ethics in psychology as a separate area (Bratus', 2019; Shaboltas, n.d.).
The Code of Ethics of the Russian Psychological Society was adopted in 2012 at the Fifth Congress of the Russian Psychological Society (Russian Psychological Society, 2012). It is based on the Constitution of the Russian Federation and reflects a wide palette of a psychologist's work. Yet, at the legislative level, this document has little power; it serves for self-regulation within the community rather than for protecting psychologists and their patients.
At the First International Conference on Ethics in Psychological Counseling and Psychotherapy in 2017, in Moscow, various aspects of ethical issues faced by counseling psychologists and psychotherapists were discussed, and a book of reports and articles from the conference was published (Kiselnikova et al., 2019).
The field of psychological research in Russia is regulated, yet quite a number of questions still arise and require a balanced approach. Multidisciplinary approaches, with philosophy serving as the foundation, could be useful in this field. One of the seminal works is the book „Would you kill the fat man?" (Edmonds, 2015), where David Edmonds outlines ethical problems, providing a comprehensive view of the classic "trolley problem" in ethics, while analyzing many ethical theories and how each would respond to it. The book Justice: What's the right thing to do?, by Michael Sandel (Sandel, 2010) argues that justice is more important than being autonomous, is. Sandel quotes Alasdair MacIntyre and his characterization of humans as being "storytelling beings" who live their lives with narrative quests. MacIntyre's best-known book, After virtue (MacIntyre, 2016) is the product of a long-term ethical project. It diagnoses contemporary society as a "culture of emotivism", where moral language is used pragmatically to manipulate attitudes, choices, and decisions, so that contemporary moral culture is a theater of illusions with objective moral rhetoric masking arbitrary choices. MacIntyre followed his seminal work with two books examining the role that traditions play in judgments about truth and falsity, Whose justice? Which rationality? (MacIntyre, 2017) and Three rival versions of moral enquiry (MacIntyre, 2006). MacIntyre's next major work, Dependent rational animals: Why human beings need the virtues, investigates the social needs and social debts of human agents, and the role that a community plays in the formation of an independent practical reason (MacIntyre, 2006) .
However, the philosophical constructions, notwithstanding their profound insights and practical validity, are still abstract models, lacking the scope for numerous minor cases loaded with emotion and unresolved tensions.
In modern fiction writing, over the past decade quite a few books have addressed important ethical issues within the framework of the putative challenges of the 21 century. Kazuo Ishiguro's novels frequently grapple with the importance of the individual within the confines of society. Over the years returning to his novel Never let me go (Ishiguro, 2006) makes one think about the possible ethical limits for a man desiring to change nature, the existence of the soul, and whether all means are good for solving global human problems.
The ethical issues are a topic for many publications and in each new decade new questions are debated (Asmolov, 2016; Koonrungsesomboon et al., 2016; Kostis et al., 2018; Leontiev, 2013).
In our study we focus on the major ethical issues arising in purely scholarly research dealing with normal people in the educational context, when no ethical problems would be expected arise at all. Still, quite a few issues appear upon closer inspection. In the following sections we address risk–benefit assessment and justification of the conduct of research, selection of a suitable target population, and informed consent in the context of our work.
Although seemingly clear-cut, it still has certain areas requiring further conceptualization and rigorous research, with a particular focus on applied issues of psychology studies today. The basic principles of research ethics are three: (a) minimizing the risk of harm; (b) obtaining informed consent; and (c) protecting anonymity and confidentiality (Laerd Dissertation, n.d.; Artal and Rubenfeld, 2017; Grech, 2018).
The importance of ethics is supported by numerous articles dealing with medical practice or interaction with special groups of respondents. Thus, articles on cancer patients, newborns, and experimental studies of humans and animals emphasize the necessity to rely on ethical norms and rules, each time checking our actions in terms of the balance between benefits and harm, observing the boundaries of autonomy, and providing the requested information to all the participants in full (Harper et al., 2018; Buzdar and Hoover, 2017; Houdayer et al., 2019). The research tradition both abroad and here in Russia rests on already established milestones in medical studies and biological research.
The legacy World War II, of tremendous shocking with experience triggered broad research on war veterans and other civilians finally leading to understanding of the need for guiding principles for investigating the human (Schuler, 2013). The first document designed to regulate the professional behavior of psychologists was the Code of Ethics of the American Psychological Association, which was adopted in 1953 (American Psychological Association, n.d.).
In Russia, psychological research has long followed the principles formulated by bioethics committees and the common sense intrinsic to the Russian school of psychology. Some issues were already formulated by B.S. Bratus' (1998). However it was not until the 21st century that special attention was paid to ethics in psychology as a separate area (Bratus', 2019; Shaboltas, n.d.).
The Code of Ethics of the Russian Psychological Society was adopted in 2012 at the Fifth Congress of the Russian Psychological Society (Russian Psychological Society, 2012). It is based on the Constitution of the Russian Federation and reflects a wide palette of a psychologist's work. Yet, at the legislative level, this document has little power; it serves for self-regulation within the community rather than for protecting psychologists and their patients.
At the First International Conference on Ethics in Psychological Counseling and Psychotherapy in 2017, in Moscow, various aspects of ethical issues faced by counseling psychologists and psychotherapists were discussed, and a book of reports and articles from the conference was published (Kiselnikova et al., 2019).
The field of psychological research in Russia is regulated, yet quite a number of questions still arise and require a balanced approach. Multidisciplinary approaches, with philosophy serving as the foundation, could be useful in this field. One of the seminal works is the book „Would you kill the fat man?" (Edmonds, 2015), where David Edmonds outlines ethical problems, providing a comprehensive view of the classic "trolley problem" in ethics, while analyzing many ethical theories and how each would respond to it. The book Justice: What's the right thing to do?, by Michael Sandel (Sandel, 2010) argues that justice is more important than being autonomous, is. Sandel quotes Alasdair MacIntyre and his characterization of humans as being "storytelling beings" who live their lives with narrative quests. MacIntyre's best-known book, After virtue (MacIntyre, 2016) is the product of a long-term ethical project. It diagnoses contemporary society as a "culture of emotivism", where moral language is used pragmatically to manipulate attitudes, choices, and decisions, so that contemporary moral culture is a theater of illusions with objective moral rhetoric masking arbitrary choices. MacIntyre followed his seminal work with two books examining the role that traditions play in judgments about truth and falsity, Whose justice? Which rationality? (MacIntyre, 2017) and Three rival versions of moral enquiry (MacIntyre, 2006). MacIntyre's next major work, Dependent rational animals: Why human beings need the virtues, investigates the social needs and social debts of human agents, and the role that a community plays in the formation of an independent practical reason (MacIntyre, 2006) .
However, the philosophical constructions, notwithstanding their profound insights and practical validity, are still abstract models, lacking the scope for numerous minor cases loaded with emotion and unresolved tensions.
In modern fiction writing, over the past decade quite a few books have addressed important ethical issues within the framework of the putative challenges of the 21 century. Kazuo Ishiguro's novels frequently grapple with the importance of the individual within the confines of society. Over the years returning to his novel Never let me go (Ishiguro, 2006) makes one think about the possible ethical limits for a man desiring to change nature, the existence of the soul, and whether all means are good for solving global human problems.
The ethical issues are a topic for many publications and in each new decade new questions are debated (Asmolov, 2016; Koonrungsesomboon et al., 2016; Kostis et al., 2018; Leontiev, 2013).
In our study we focus on the major ethical issues arising in purely scholarly research dealing with normal people in the educational context, when no ethical problems would be expected arise at all. Still, quite a few issues appear upon closer inspection. In the following sections we address risk–benefit assessment and justification of the conduct of research, selection of a suitable target population, and informed consent in the context of our work.
